Yang Lian [China / UK]

 

Dark Dawn①

 
            for Jimmy Chee-Ying Lai
 
daybreak farther and farther way     as you smile     turn around
vanish behind that door     wife sobbing
ocean waves sobbing     time’s     anchor chain broken
add 20 years to 78 years old     a weightless infinity
 
this is no final farewell     the deep pit of the years
waits always for a live burial     a human sacrifice
as neon-lit streets fill with ripples of betrayal and false witness
your craggy back view     is carved into the seabed like a reef
 
back to the home of tribulation     like the road to work every day
the word NO trampling an elegy’s last lingering syllable
death     incomparably strange incomparably familiar
 
the sentence     a ruling on the world’s eyes unendingly following
your calm     tranquil folding of the hands
infused the darkest depths     to hold up an impossible light
 
 
①  Jimmy Chee-Ying Lai’s Chinese surname is "Li" (黎), which is the same as the first character of the Chinese word " dawn" (黎明). At the same time, the character "黎"(Li) itself also has the meaning of "dark". Therefore, the title of this poem is translated as "Dark Dawn".
 
                                   (Translated by Brian Holton)
 
 

 
Four Years Now, Ukraine 

flags heads down     a vast tract of multicoloured

wheat     stretches in silence to the horizon
on the photo a pair of gorgeous eyes through ice and snow
smile     black earth and cold both convulsing 

a twenty-first century reduced to rubble

its back turned to humans     premature death draped in excuses
sculpting death not to be dreaded become unbearable
Ukraine     the nightmare’s repetition still meaningless yet again
 
except to prove that hell isn’t underfoot    it is in the heart
a deep well with a descending spiral staircase
exhibits the same pile of ashes all the way
 
following close behind a buzzing machine
frozen stiff and transparent unavenged souls               squeeze into
the endless continuing Doomsday and its great harvest 

24^th February 2026

                              (Translated by Brian Holton)

 

 
 
168 Little Elegies Refusing Reincarnation
 
-       for children in Iran
 
168 sweet-smelling holes
sat in order in the classroom      168
little faces      voices     childlike-sounding radar
guided in all unknowing the flying axes
 
the cowards cagily responding to the threats
hiding in girls       targeting girls
we finally understood the only page of the text we read
this enormous little slaughter        this tiny enormous massacre 
 
life’s launchers caught up with death’s GPS
for an instant a flash of flame promised reincarnation       but
why did we reincarnate? reincarnate for whom? reincarnate to where?
 
hell is bright as broad day       168
little elegies       scatter in faint light smoke
there is no time       and no one cares
 
  15th March 2026
                              (Translated  by Brian Holton)
 
 
 
 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Yang Lian was born in Switzerland, grew up in China and now lives in London. He published 15 volumes of poetry, 2 volumes of prose, and many essays. His work has been translated into more 30 languages, and his representative works including YI, Where the Sea Stands Still; Concentric Circles; Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections; Lee Valley Poems, Narrative Poem, Anniversary Snow…, and the most recent one is A Tower Built Downwards. His works have been reviewed as "like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!'", "one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature". Among other awards, Yang Lian won 2024, The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (Poland); A Tower Built Downwards, was shortlisted for the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize and won the English PEN Award 2023; 2021 the first Sarah McGuire Prize for Poetry in Translation held by Poetry in Translation Centre; 2020, he won“Jiu Ge Prize”of the first Miluo Literature Prize in China; 2019 Premio Sulmona” in Italy; 2018 NordSud International Prize for Literature, Italy, The 2018 Janus Pannonius International Poetry Grand in Hungary. 2017, Narrative Poem was selected as a recommended translation by Poetry Book Society in UK, as well as won the English PEN Award. 2016, he won the Pacific International Poetry Prize in Taiwan; 2014, the International Capri Prize; 2012, Nonino International Literature Prize. Yang Lian was a DAAD fellow in Berlin 1991-- 1992 and a fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2012-2013. He was elected a board member of PEN International at 2008 and 2011; 2013, he invited to become a member of The Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression; 2014, he was invited to be a distinguished professor and writer in residency in Shantou University in China and quit the job at 2023. Yang Lian lives in Berlin and London.